Ghost World

Paul Eno doesn’t believe in ghosts per se; he ascribes to a multiverse theory where the deceased thrive in parallel universes.

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Though he’s scored a hit with the New Age crowd, Eno hardly looks the part. With his spectacles and neatly trimmed beard, and his penchant for blazers and Oxford shirts, he could be a genial English professor. He spent twenty years in the newspaper business, starting at the Pawtuxet Valley Times and ending up as a news editor at The Providence Journal. Later he launched New River Press, originally putting out newsletters and then switching to book publishing. He lives in a middle-class city neighborhood with his wife, Jackie, a paralegal, and his sons, Jonathan, twenty-four, and Benjamin, fifteen, who sometimes joins his dad on ghost-hunting expeditions. The house is crammed with books and religious icons from a dozen faiths, which is hardly surprising, as Eno once thought he would become a priest. He studied at both Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox seminaries before his superiors caught wind of his interest in the paranormal and suggested he find a different profession. “A lucky escape,” he says, “for both the church and myself.”

The whole time, he kept seeking out haunted places, and eventually people began calling him for help. Spend a little time with Eno, and you’ll hear how he watched a ghost rearrange classroom furniture in a Massachusetts school; how he photographed an apparition in a Woonsocket attic; how he comforted a depressed spirit who hung out in a Cumberland home. On one of his first jaunts, he and friends spent the night at a long-abandoned colonial village in the woods of Pomfret, Connecticut. By Eno’s account, they watched bluish streaks and blobs move through the trees and eavesdropped on nineteenth-century residents.

 “Up to that point, I thought ghosts might be spirits in Purgatory,” he recalls. “That episode changed my mind. These people did not sound like they were dead. I knew I had to go looking for something else.”

As with most claims about the paranormal, of course, there’s no shortage of doubters. At the Southern California-based Skeptics Society, an organization that seeks to debunk superstition and irrational belief, folks are, well, skeptical. “The multiverse is just a mathematical construct. No one knows if it really exists,” says Pat Linse, society co-founder. “A person like [Eno] wants the authority of science without having to follow the rules of science. He’s made such a whopper of a claim that it’s difficult to say anything about it.”


And few of Eno’s fellow ghost hunters are jumping on the bandwagon. Most of them still hang on to old legends about spooky graveyards and creaky homes with mansard roofs. Take that mill in Foster, known locally as the Ram Tail Factory. Though only the foundation stands today, it remains a favorite spot for those hoping to see or somehow document an apparition. Tom D’Agostino, a paranormal investigator from Burrillville, has visited the mill ruins more than forty times, and he swears he’s come across entities on two occasions.

“During our first visit, we were outside the main building when I saw a white, oblong figure pass by. It came out of nowhere, floated around for awhile, and then returned to the woods,” he says. “On another visit, at night, we heard a swinging lantern pass by. A minute or two later it passed by again, in the other direction. The two people I was with became believers—and they never went back there.”

He also unearthed some historic records. He has a photocopy of a page from the 1885 state census that lists properties in Foster; next to “Ram Tail Factory” is the word “haunted.”

Over the past twenty-five years, D’Ago-stino has explored scores of sites and produced several books on his adventures, including Haunted Rhode Island. When snooping for spooks, he and his wife, Arlene, carry a briefcase of high-tech gadgetry to document his findings. He packs a hand-held gauss meter, a device used in geophysical surverys to locate iron deposits, to measure electro-magnetic fields. Ghosts, according to many paranormal investigators, give off electrical energy. He’s got a thermal scanner, a thermometer that measures temperatures from a distance. When spirits are nearby, D’Agostino says, the thermometer reading can drop twenty degrees or more. Their favorite gizmo is an electronic sound recorder. Like many ghost hunters, they believe spectral voices are made up of electrical waves, not acou-stic waves, and a digital recorder may pick up quieter sounds that a traditional one wouldn’t catch.